How FF7's Materia System Works Wonders
A while ago I watched a video claiming that turn-based RPGs such as Final Fantasy VII were all rubbish, because they are simply too easy. The points boiled down to the purported fact that “as long as you can heal your characters faster than they take damage, you can never lose, and therefore…something something, I just don’t like the genre.” but hold on! If that’s the case then how did I just get utterly destroyed by Jenova Life on my 500th playthrough of the game despite being over-levelled. Well, the thing about deep turn-based combat is, it’s just as much about preparing for battle as it is about the battles themselves and Final Fantasy VII provides a unique and expansive tool to do just that! We’re talking about the fantastic materia system.
Balance
Let’s start by picking apart why I lost to Jenova-life despite being the obvious Final Fantasy expert I am. (Maybe over-confidence?) The materia system is fundamental to the balance of the game in deeper ways than some might realise at first. When I was a kid, in an attempt to turn Cloud into the fighting badass he was portrayed to be, I would slap all of my best materia onto him, everything from ultima to comet to revive. Then I noticed something, Cloud didn’t seem to have anywhere near as much HP as the rest of the party. Come to think of it, Cait Sith seemed to do more damage than him on his normal attacks and whenever Cloud was hit, he’d take more damage than anyone else in the party. I searched for some sort of hidden status effect and worried I had permanently damaged my Cloud as even at level 99, something just seemed off about his stats.
Of course I eventually realised that every single piece of materia you equip can affect any number of stats and the more powerful the materia, the bigger the difference. This is usually a negative to things like defence and hit points and a positive to magic points and magic defence. So whilst the initial instinct might be to equip your team with as much materia as possible throughout the game, upgrading your weapons to the ones with the most materia slots as early as possible, I find that it’s far better to use some of the weaker weapons that have double and triple materia growth but far less materia slots. This means you have more of a decision to make on which materia to use and which to group together now with a much more limited number of linked slots. On the plus side you gain access to more powerful spells much earlier on, again the games balance kicks in though, as with less materia equipped your MP pool does not have the increases it usually would from having all that materia, meaning you might have to use an ether here and there to continue using this higher level magic.
In earlier Final Fantasy games, you would simply buy more powerful magic as the story progressed, not so in Final Fantasy VII. Much more satisfaction can be gained from levelling up materia through battle to gain access to the more powerful spells. Buying new materia can be very expensive, but thrifty players can easily get by on what they find and be rewarded later on when master level materia births a duplicate level 1 materia for you to level all over again. For the really rare materia, this means that without considerable effort, only one copy of it can be used at a time.
Again, as a kid, a dungeon such as Cave of the Gi in Cosmo Canyon took all of my mental strength to get through. Not only would the scary spider-like stingers kill me off quite frequently but the boss, Gi Nattak would always cause me trouble too, it would take me many, many attempts to finally beat it. On my recent playthrough however, not only did I have ample HP to get through the dungeon, where things like poison posed a serious threat before, but I used the Added Effect materia that you get near the start of the cave linked to a Time materia on Cloud’s weapon. At this point you’d only have a level 1 Time with haste and nothing else, but paired with Added Effect, Cloud’s attacks would inflict slow and stop on most enemies in the cave including the boss. I trounced Gi Nattak which had given me so much trouble in the past by ample preparation and understanding of the options available to me…..What’s that, you can kill the boss by using a single x potion on him...you get an x potion right before the fight? Damn 7 year old me!
You might think this harkens back to that complaint of turn-based games, or more specifically FF7 being too easy but this isn’t the kind of difficulty level that requires nothing of the player. The kind of ease found in shooters like Call of Duty or Fallout 4 that allow players to breeze through the game without using their brain. Final Fantasy VII only became easier once I contemplated the mechanics of the game, the options afforded to me by the materia system and its impact on the characters. Let’s compare this to Final Fantasy VIII, overall a far easier game. With just a bit of grinding at the first opportunity, you can unlock a load of game-changing GF abilities allowing you to equip high-level magic to players and deal massive amounts of damage with boosted GF summon attacks. Not much effort or prep for a comparatively high gain and a system that is almost too open in the amount of customising you can do down to choosing every single command a character can perform. On the other end of the scale is Final Fantasy IX where the available moves of each character are set and with one of the least amount of customisation available in any Final Fantasy. Time is of the essence for completionists who wish to reach the final area in under 12 hours to get Steiner’s ultimate weapon, but without taking the time to grind and equip your players with costly weapon and armour upgrades throughout the game, boss battles can be frustratingly difficult. With fewer options available to the player in preparation for battle, the only option becomes levelling up or buying better equipment, not formulating better strategies, because in FF9 you usually want to hit with the hardest attacks and magic available every turn and hope that bosses don’t use their best attacks too often. This could be an argument for how Final Fantasy VII has the best combat system of the 3 ps1 games because again, the game’s difficulty is based only on your understanding of the materia system.
Lore
Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid is an amazing mechanic for freely building up your characters, but what actually is it? It’s not a tangible thing in the world and the characters don’t really talk about it as an object that they are physically inserting spheres into. Similarly, the Guardian Forces of FF8 are a confusing concept as despite being commonly used, even by uninitiated SEED candidates, they seem to be very rare. If the mechanics of the game are anything to go by then a single GF cannot be used by more than one person but if that’s the case there would have to be hundreds if not thousands of GF’s in existence. Despite this, they are only vaguely referenced and not directly discussed by many characters in the game.
Materia is a different beast. It is at the very core of what Final Fantasy VII is about and is not only explained in detail by various characters but also plays a role in this world’s economy and environment. This means that whilst materia is effective as a gameplay system, it is made all the more immersive and given that much more weight because it goes hand in hand with the lore and narrative of the game. Most of the population centres of the world display a huge social divide between rich and poor, initiated primarily by the Shinra corporation who leech mako energy from the earth, greedily hoarding it for their own purposes. Mako is the source of materia, so while materia has become more abundant due to Shinra’s mako reactors, these are often low quality or synthetic materia developed in a lab. (As we learn in the PSP prequel Crisis Core) All materia is expensive, but the most powerful materia springs up from a natural process where mako energy (or the lifestream as it’s also known) comes to the surface of the planet.
Shinra stop at nothing to take over these areas of land, even burning down whole towns like Corel to set up their reactors so rare materia is usually kept as an item of incredible value by common folk, such as the Ultima materia found by the girl after the big materia mission. If you manage to stop the train from derailing and killing innocent people in North Corel, the girl will give you the materia as a reward, otherwise Ultima will set you back an extortionate 50,000 gil. Final Fantasy VII is full of little story beats like this that prop up the importance of materia, not just to the main characters, but all characters in the game. It rules over them, whether they like it or not.
Whilst mako energy has brought better lifestyles to many, such as the people of Kalm, by providing them with electricity, there is a danger to using mako which has parallels to real life nuclear energy production and its radiation. Over-exposure to mako causes a debilitating poisoning of mind and body, people lose their ability to speak and walk and will most likely die from complete immersion in the lifestream. This is a brilliant story explanation of one of the gameplay mechanics of materia, because we know that exposure to mako can be harmful, materia is made from concentrated mako and when equipped to a character their health points and physical defence go down. That's Beautiful world-building.
There’s Yuffie and her obsession with bringing prosperity to her hometown through stealing materia, or the world ending black materia itself. The examples of how important materia is are near endless, far too many to mention here, but not many games tie in their main plot device to a gameplay system with such success as Final Fantasy VII did with materia.
Creativity
As mentioned, the materia system is a tool allowing the player to prepare for battle, so in order for it to be fun it needs to allow for player expression and creativity. I think it delivers this in spades. To recap, most materia slots on equipment have one to four linked pairs allowing certain materia to have an effect on whatever it is paired to. The first of these encountered is the All materia which allows most magic to be cast on all enemies or party members.
I already mentioned the added effect materia but it is more versatile than just having one use. As well as allowing you to inflict status effects on enemies when paired on a weapon, if you pair this with materia on armour slots you gain defence against the status effects relating to that materia. The elemental materia works in a similar way, adding elemental offense or defense which can come in handy for fights such as that Jonova-Life boss I talked about. Her attacks are all water-based, so pairing Leviathan with Elemental on armour slots with your primary healer is one strategy of many. Yes, you can even pair up summon materia, they’re not just for dishing out big damage. A playstyle I tired out in this playthrough was to use the curse ring, a recurring Final Fantasy item I usually ignore. It provides huge stat boosts but inflicts death sentence at the start of battle, but pair Odin with added effect and your character is immune.
Of course, the more you play and the more materia you acquire, the more creative options afforded to you. These can play into certain play styles you might have set up for characters, for example, I give defensive stat boosts primarily to Barrett, meaning the cover materia is ideal for him. The higher the level of cover, the more often Barrett will end up tanking hits for the other characters. But why stop there? With counter attack materia Barrett will also hit back for every time he covers as well as being hit normally. There’s also a counter materia which can be paired, meaning characters can use anything from bolt to Knights of Round when hit by an enemy.
Similarly, final attack materia uses the paired materia when a character dies. An obvious pairing for this would be the Phoenix summon which, after damaging the enemy, revives all party members. It may seem like a cheat, but summons can only be used as many times as their level per battle, so it’s not a fool-proof strategy. One criticism I could levy at the game in this respect would be the lack of some sort of hidden dungeon with super high level enemies that really push these materia pairings to the limit.
Another new strategy I tried out was pairing added cut to command materia like Deathblow and Double Cut. The first was a great fit for Tifa who has a high accuracy mid-game weapon that essentially guarantees deathblow will hit when it otherwise would usually miss. Otherwise added cut would guarantee the move would not be wasted in any case as it adds a normal attack on top of the paired materia attack. Once double cut is levelled up it allows for a normal attack to hit 4 times, 5 times with added cut means that any high offence character will be cleaning up in practically any battle in the game.
Perhaps the best example I can give of how interesting things can get with materia are the super-bosses Ruby and Emerald weapon. You will almost definitely have to have acquired most of the rarest materia in the game. that means training and breeding chocobos to get a gold chocobo which can traverse the entire world map. Why? Because these bosses not only have a ludicrous amount of HP but their moves require thinking outside the box with battle strategies more than any other fight in the game. Emerald weapon has an attack which deals more damage to characters the more materia they have equipped and Ruby Weapon can completely remove two of your party members from the battle. Very nasty.
There are a few strategies but I’ll go through the most popular one that makes use of the mime materia and the most powerful summon in the game, Knights Of Round. Mime allows you to replicate the last attack done by one of your characters for no MP cost, meaning if Knights of Round was cast previously, (even multiple times if you make use of the W-summon materia) it will be cast again for no MP. You could take the time to use this command every turn and make sure your characters are able to heal when necessary and you’ll probably be able to best these super bosses with a couple of attempts, or you can go to the absolute extreme and set up your materia to automatically bring destruction upon anything that dares to touch your character. Because by pairing mime with counter, and knights of round with HP absorb allowing the attack to completely heal you, alongside the aforementioned phoenix with final attack pairing, you can guarantee victory by casting Knights of Round basically every single time anything happens until the enemy is utterly obliterated and there’s nothing they can do as you keep reviving yourself over and over.
It takes a lot of time and effort to get all the materia in the game, every minute of it is fun of course. I used to miss out on a lot in some playthroughs before I knew where to find everything and how it all worked. In a way that’s a shame, but thinking about it, it just means my appreciation for Final Fantasy VII has continued to grow the more times I play it. Balance, lore and creativity have made materia one of the greatest gameplay systems of all time and if there’s any argument to be made for Final Fantasy VII being the masterpiece it is often claimed to be, materia must be at the very core of that argument. It also remains to be seen whether the FF7 remake can understand and recreate such a deep and expansive system in its future entries. Will Tetsuya Nomura’s team allow for such an amount of customisation or will Remake’s materia be a cheap imitation?